Lessons from: The Death of Expertise

Name: The Death of Expertise

Author(s): Nichols, Tom

Synopsis

This book was not what I was expecting it to be - I was thinking that it would be a book on how having a wide range of skills was better than being a subject matter expert on a few things, similar to the book by David Epstein - Instead it turned out to be a charged narrative on how laypeople (and remember, all of us are laypeople at something) are more doubtful/dismissive of experts, and choose to believe/do things that ignore or are completely contrary to what the experts say. You should not judge a book by the cover.

Anyway, this trend does not seem to be borne out of lack of education or access to information (since we are more "educated" than we have ever been and have more information in the palm of our hands than people 50 years ago had in their city libraries). Instead, the reason seems to be more insidious: we refuse to learn ourselves, and then refuse to listen to what experts are telling us. The author says it well: worse than ignorance, it is unfounded arrogance.

An expert is anyone with a broad and deep understanding and competence in terms of knowledge, skill and experience through practice and education in a particular field. So, we're literally going with the dictionary definition here. These experts could be scientists who know how to do science, doctors who know how to treat disease or MBAs who know how to run businesses, but they can also be from much less "glamorous" professions such as the garbageman who knows how to keep our streets clean, the primary school teacher who knows how to impart foundational education to children or the cab driver who knows the fastest route during rush hour traffic so that you don't miss your flight.

All of us possess rudimentary knowledge on a variety of subjects, but it is these experts, who have become so through training and experience, that we should rely on when the stakes are high enough.

Unfortunately, according to the author, we seem to be "witnessing the death of the ideal of expertise itself". This is a systemic problem that has the potential to undo some of the progress we have made over the last several decades. The author puts it nicely: This is the opposite of education, which should aim to make people, no matter how smart or accomplished they are, learners for the rest of their lives. Rather, we now live in a society where the acquisition of even a little learning is the endpoint, rather than the beginning, of education. And this is a dangerous thing.

I should put a disclaimer here, the author is a US citizen, and his experience may be something that is seen more in parts of the US and perhaps not in other countries. Nonetheless, the ideas are worth exploring, let's see what they are.

Core ideas

1. So what if expertise is dying, who cares?
1. Expertise is not dying, come on, look around you - Our lives are more complicated (though more convenient) than they have ever been. The complex supply chains that bring us our breakfast, the technological backbone that brings us entertainment on our mobile screens, the telecommunications network that allows us to talk to people thousands of kilometers away - directionally speaking, we are living in paradise compared to our ancestors. These and other innovations have enriched our lives - and we have experts to thank for them.
2. Yes, they made mistakes while they were at it, but they were right more times than they were wrong. Yes, they might not have had the most altruistic intentions, but they did end up benefitting us.
3. With every passing day the body of knowledge available to humankind, the experts and their expertise, grows. Higher education is a good example, a few centuries ago one could become a doctor or engineer of everything, but today you have to choose, even as a doctor or engineer, what to specialize in (neurosurgeon or orthopedist, aerospace engineer or civil engineer).
4. So, expertise is not dying - let's be clear. Instead, it is the ideal of expertise that is dying.
2. OK, so what if the ideal of expertise is dying, who cares?
1. You see, there is this American ideal (though I think it is an attractive proposition nationality irrespective) of the self-sufficient man or woman. The one who through his dedication and hard work is able to learn the ropes of almost any discipline from changing a tyre to waterproofing a roof to treating a dog bite to running a government. Who does not have need to rely on others for daily subsistence, and in some cases may even lend them a helping hand. It feels good to think of oneself this way.
2. However, the modern-day layperson is beginning to understand that they don't really know how the things in their lives work and if something went wrong with them - they'd be at the mercy of experts. And beyond their personal lives, they realize that they are incapable of having a nuanced opinion about most things the world is going through (and there are so many things the world is going through) - there are just too many perspectives to consider, things are not as black and white as they once were. The modern-day layperson realizes that far from being self-sufficient, s/he has become hopelessly dependent. It does not feel good to think of oneself this way.
3. This dependency on experts and their expertise, by the way, is not a problem. If everyone does their jobs then it's actually good to have certain people specialize in certain things. 
4. But somehow, the common man is not okay with this. He sees the facts around him: the increasing complexity of his life, the fruits of expert's expertise that have made his life safe and convenient - and yet, he chooses to believe that he knows best and the experts are wrong.
1. I think this has something to do with ego. Even though he knows it, he doesn't like being told that he is ignorant about most things in life and would be better off if he just listened to the experts.
2. I think this has something to do with American culture that seems to aim for an ideal of equality between all.
3. I should point out that the Dunning-Kruger effect is also at play which gives the layperson the confidence they need to ignore experts: the dumber you are, the more confident you are that you’re not actually dumb.
4. And so is confirmation bias that tends to keep only those facts in our minds that already align with our worldview.
5. And so, what has emerged is a systemic denial of expertise with laypeople wilfully ignore advice from experts. The following two quotes from the book are revealing:
1. Indeed, ignorance has become hip, with some Americans now wearing their rejection of expert advice as a badge of cultural sophistication.
2. Americans no longer distinguish the phrase “you’re wrong” from the phrase “you’re stupid.” To disagree is to disrespect. To correct another is to insult. And to refuse to acknowledge all views as worthy of consideration, no matter how fantastic or inane they are, is to be closed-minded.
6. This can be dangerous when such denial of expertise reaches scale: Think about the anti-vaccine movement, the raw milk movement and of course, the anti-mask movement recently.
3. The commodification of education
1. What link does the denial of expertise have with the US education system? Well, the way kids are being "educated" today - it seems to be training them to be deniers of expertise later on in life.
2. Why is this happening? Because there are too many colleges around these days.
1. Earlier, education used to be a scarce commodity (not what we want BTW) and so those who did get educated generally went in with a willingness to learn, like, you know, they valued the education and respected their teachers.
2. But as we went about making more colleges to get more people educated (a good thing BTW) - this resulted in a problem of too many colleges. Now these colleges needed money to keep going, and there are a few good ways to do that such as increasing the quality of education, the faculty to student ratio, the kind of faculty. 
3. But there are also not ideal ways to do that.
3. According to the author: "College is supposed to be an uncomfortable experience. It is where a person leaves behind the rote learning of childhood and accepts the anxiety, discomfort, and challenge of complexity that leads to the acquisition of deeper knowledge—hopefully, for a lifetime.".
1. However, colleges these days, in order to stay afloat (and here the author makes a distinction between "elite" colleges in a field, and the remaining ones) have to employ tactics beyond the quality of education they provide.
2. "Driven to compete for teenagers and their loan dollars, educational institutions promise an experience rather than an education.".
4. They are not students, they are our customers: No denying that college are businesses, and like businesses they need to make money. But as per the author this trend has gone overboard, and colleges/universities today are employing tactics that cater to their every whim and inculcate in students a sense of unfounded entitlement so that they feel good about taking admission. The student customer is always right. This treatment of students as customers or clients is what the author calls the "commodification of education".
1. Making admissions easy: More than three-quarters of American undergraduates attend colleges that accept at least half their applicants. "The fact of the matter is that “private colleges—at least those below the elite levels—are desperate for students and willing to accept deeply unqualified ones if it means more tuition dollars."
2. A culture that coddles: There is a culture that forbids confronting children with failure (also links with helicopter parenting) and puts the blame on teachers if the child does fail, that the teacher is not doing enough for the child. Or the fact that colleges will place teachers and students on equal footing (with some teachers also actually believing this) through teacher evaluations and other innocent initiatives  that make students erroneously think that their knowledge/opinion on a subject is as good/valid as the teacher's. Or the trend on making college a "safe space" that is essentially making students overly sensitive to small and frankly inconsequential matters.
3. Padding grades and giving everyone a degree: "When college is a business, you can't flunk the customers.". As per the author, inflating grades is a real phenomenon in US education, which leads to a large student body successfully graduating. However, whether those new graduates are any good in terms of skill, or have imbibed the right mindset of lifelong learning is not so clear. And since there are many more students graduating with the same degrees, this may also lead to dilution of the value of that degree and, a feeling of unfair levelling down that a student of an elite school may have OR a feeling of unfair treatment of elite school students that a student of a non-elite school may have.
4. Conveniences that take away the soft-skills gained in college: Like separate living quarters (co-living spaces in college prepare us for social life later on, like learning how to get along with different people).
5. All this results in a youth body that is overly sensitive, whose arrogance in their own abilities is unfounded and who do not value expertise like it should be.
1. "And if college graduates can no longer be counted on to lead reasoned debate and discussion in American life, and to know the difference between knowledge and feeling, then we’re indeed in the kind of deep trouble no expert can fix."
4. The Internet making us dumber
1. The "Internet has accelerated the collapse of communication between experts and laypeople by offering an apparent shortcut to erudition. It allows people to mimic intellectual accomplishment by indulging in an illusion of expertise provided by a limitless supply of facts."
1. Unfortunately, because the internet is mostly democratic, it allows anyone to put anything out there. And so, it becomes a prime client for Sturgeon's law: Ninety percent of everything, is crap.
2. However, people don't seem to remember this, and even if they want to, confirmation bias is a real thing.
2. And by the way, not only is there junk on the internet, the sheer amount of stuff (good or bad) is so much that it paralyses our ability to make a deeply informed decision.
1. According to the author, this has led to change in how we consume information or media in general - We prefer to skim over it instead of diving deep. I think the rising trend of "shorts" on popular social media is also proof in point.
2. This makes us make quick judgments (I am reminded of "System 1" thinking) that often turn out to be wrong.
3. This has implications for society at large, at best it leads to people being worse off than if they knew nothing at all, and at worst it can allow bad actors to mobilize social action through a series media blasts that cherry pick evidence for their cause.
3. Apart from making us dumber, it is also making us more divided as we can easily live in their echo chambers and never have to do the hard work of verifying their assumptions against opposing viewpoints.
1. We argue on social media with people and in ways that we would never in real life, and do not change our mind in face of compelling evidence like we once might have. The internet provides a misplaced sense of equality in its anonymity and distance. It seems the internet is too democratic for its own good.
5. Journalism of information entertainment
1. Similar to the earlier point on education, what happened over the last half century has been a commodification and proliferation of news sources across media types - the sheer amount of "news" that we get everyday has grown exponentially.
1. It seems to me like the "diabetes of information"
2. With so much to take in, it's very easy to find those sources you agree with (confirmation bias), and this goes against the ethos of journalism, since instead of informing viewers/listeners/readers about multiple viewpoints, it makes them think that their viewpoint is the only one and the right one. Instead of being "poorly informed, they're misinformed.".
2. And in a rush to gain viewership/listenership/readership these outlets have had to mix a little bit of entertainment with their journalism (gonzo journalism)
1. "... in a market glutted by information, it was only a matter of time before the tables were turned and journalists were asking readers what they would like to read instead of informing them about things they must know."
2. "This fusing of entertainment, news, punditry, and citizen participation is a chaotic mess that does not inform people so much as it creates the illusion of being informed."
3. A brief timeline of how things got to the way they were:
1. It started with talk radio that provided a cost-effective alternative to FM and TV for radio hosts to do long form shows where they essentially painted a picture of the world through their eyes. Soon talk radio became an echo chamber where distrust and attack on established knowledge was commonplace.
2. Then came the 24 hours new channel that started with CNN but soon was followed by many others - the idea that one could now watch (and there could even be enough to call) "news" 24-hours a day was a concept that no one was willing to believe until CNN proved otherwise. What happened was the proliferation of "news" on every topic that one could think of, and since there was soon several competing 24-hour news channels, the channels had to give their coverage a more dramatic, sensational feel to get eyeballs. Fox News gets a special mention for having "made the news faster, slicker, and, with the addition of news readers who were actual beauty queens, prettier.".
3. By this time there was already enough "news" going around that the average viewer could reasonably consume. And then news channels discovered the internet. The author writes: "The Internet and the proliferation of news media were already problems for experts, but the synergy created by the combination of news and the Internet is a problem of Gibraltarian proportions for experts trying to communicate with laypeople who already believe that staring at their phone while sitting on the subway is the equivalent of keeping up with the world’s events.".
6. When the experts are wrong
1. Fact is, experts are human, and to err is to be human. So, if we are willing to accept the benefits of expertise, then we must also be willing to accept the occasional pitfall (assumption being that experts are less wrong and wrong less number of times than laypeople will ever be, so its pragmatic to trust them).
2. "Laypeople should not jump to the assumption that a missed call by the experts therefore means all opinions are equally valid (or equally worthless)."
3. However, problems start to occur when:
1. Try to stretch their expertise to areas that they are not experts in.
2. Go from offering explanations (post facto) to making predictions.
3. Put personal gain over anything else.
7. Where do we go from here
1. It's a pretty grim forecast: the death of the ideal of expertise is also in some ways the death of a democratic form of government.
1. Progress of any form requires dedicated focus on the subject matter, this dedicated focus build expertise over time. Expertise leads to improvement in our quality of life, but it also increases the complexity of the world we live in.
2. For us to grow expertise while managing complexity, society needs the division of labour (and consequent specialization of individuals (experts) in their respective fields) as well as a way to use that expert labour for progress.
3. This bodes well for a democratic form of government because a democracy can allow for increase in quality of life (through fruits of expertise) without inundating the average citizen with complexity by nudging her to delegate the responsibility of decision making to "elected representatives and their expert advisors", who have been chosen by her through rational thought.
4. But if people stop believing in their experts (and then do not even make an effort to educate themselves either), then they will bring to power those who are less capable of running a strong and progressive government. That is not good.
1. "If the public has no idea about the substance of an issue, and will vote based on who they like rather than what they want ... How can a republic function if the people who have sent their representatives to decide questions of war and peace cannot tell the difference between Agrabah, Ukraine, or Syria?"
2. In the end the author is not very hopeful on the revival of the ideal of expertise - He mentions some recent "trumpets sounding the impending death of expertise" both on the American and international stages such as Trump's election as the 45th president of the USA and Brexit.
1. Further, he goes on to say that a resolution of the problem is less likely to be gradual (and relatively easy) than it is to be in the form of "war or an economic collapse". Which basically means that he thinks the modern-day average Joe will need to be shaken out of his slumber, gentle nudges won't do.
3. Experts, for their part, can take steps to increase transparency with which they do things and be more accountable for their actions.
4. However, it is the citizens of the USA must bear the ultimate responsibility for changing the current state of affairs before it is too late. They must stop being arrogant of their ignorance.
1. They must be willing to trust experts that they know at least better than chance what they are talking about/doing.
2. They must be willing to make the effort to educate themselves at least reasonably on the policies that affect their lives.
3. They must have realistic expectations of what their country's political and economic system can provide. And also understand what it was built for, that is, "... be the vehicle by which an informed electorate—informed being the key word here—could choose other people to represent them and to make decisions on their behalf.".

Notable quotes

• No, the bigger problem is that we’re proud of not knowing things. Americans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue.
• People don’t just believe dumb things; they actively resist further learning rather than let go of those beliefs.
• Over time, I found that other specialists in various policy areas had the same experiences, with laypeople subjecting them to ill - informed disquisitions on taxes, budgets, immigration, the environment, and many other subjects. If you’re a policy expert, it goes with the job.
• Again, it may be that attacks on expertise are more obvious due to the ubiquity of the Internet, the undisciplined nature of conversation on social media, or the demands of the twenty - four - hour news cycle. But there is a self - righteousness and fury to this new rejection of expertise that suggest, at least to me, that this isn’t just mistrust or questioning or the pursuit of alternatives: it is narcissism, coupled to a disdain for expertise as some sort of exercise in self - actualization.
• These are dangerous times. Never have so many people had so much access to so much knowledge and yet have been so resistant to learning anything.
• Not only do increasing numbers of laypeople lack basic knowledge, but they also reject fundamental rules of evidence and refuse to learn how to make a logical argument. In doing so, they risk throwing away centuries of accumulated knowledge and undermining the practices and habits that allow us to develop new knowledge.
• I fear we are witnessing the death of the ideal of expertise itself, a Google - fueled , Wikipedia - based, blog - sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laypeople,
• Americans now believe that having equal rights in a political system also means that each person’s opinion about anything must be accepted as equal to anyone else’s.
• ... if citizens do not bother to gain basic literacy in the issues that affect their lives, they abdicate control over those issues whether they like it or not.
• Experts have a responsibility to educate. Voters have a responsibility to learn.
• Indeed, ignorance has become hip, with some Americans now wearing their rejection of expert advice as a badge of cultural sophistication.
• Knowing things is not the same as understanding them. Comprehension is not the same thing as analysis. Expertise is a not a parlor game played with factoids.
• Arguing at length with a conspiracy theorist is not only fruitless but sometimes dangerous, and I do not recommend it.
• ... when facts conflict with our values, “almost everyone finds a way to stick with their values and reject the evidence.”
• Scads of unemployed PhDs, toting mediocre dissertations in any number of overly esoteric subjects, roam the academic landscape literally willing to teach for food.
• Tiny local schools that once catered to area residents have reemerged as “universities,” as though they now have a particle collider behind the cafeteria.
• Today, professors do not instruct their students; instead, the students instruct their professors, with an authority that comes naturally to them.
• Unearned praise and hollow successes build a fragile arrogance in students that can lead them to lash out at the first teacher or employer who dispels that illusion, a habit that proves hard to break in adulthood.
• There is no way around the reality that students are too often wasting their money and obtaining the illusion of an education by gravitating toward courses or majors that either shouldn’t exist or whose enrollments should be restricted to the small number of students who intend to pursue them seriously and with rigor.
• When college is a business, you can’t flunk the customers.
• Still, there’s something wrong with a system that asks a student how much they liked their education. College isn’t a restaurant.
• ... bad information can stay online for years.
• This is erudition in the age of cyberspace: You surf until you reach the conclusion you’re after. You click your way to validation, confusing the presence of a website with the plausibility of an argument.”
• Even with the best of intentions, crowd - sourced projects like Wikipedia suffer from an important but often unremarked distinction between laypeople and professionals: volunteers do what interests them at any given time, while professionals employ their expertise every day.
• The Internet and social media, however, are making us less social and more confrontational.
• In the age of social media, people using the Internet assume that everyone is equally intelligent or informed merely by virtue of being online.
• The anonymity of social media tempts users into arguing as though every participant is the same, a group of peers starting from the same level of background and education.
• allowing anyone to express a view means that almost anyone will express a view,
• Prime Directive for experts : never tell other experts how to do their jobs .
• Talking heads bluster, interrupt, and otherwise disport themselves in rude ways. Viewers rejoice in the spectacle. Advertising is sold. Money is made.
• In the competition for viewers, simply putting “news” on television isn’t enough.
• The modern media, with so many options tailored to particular views, is a huge exercise in confirmation bias. This means that Americans are not just poorly informed, they’re misinformed.
• In part, American distrust of the media is just one symptom of the larger malady: Americans increasingly don’t trust anyone anymore.
• Still, there is no way around it: a non - negligible amount of published scientific research is shaky at best and falsified at worse.
• One of the most common errors experts make is to assume that because they are smarter than most people about certain things, they are smarter than everyone about everything. They see their expert knowledge as a license to hold court about anything.
• Experts and professionals, just as people in other endeavors , assume that their previous successes and achievements are evidence of their superior knowledge, and they push their boundaries rather than say the three words every expert hates to say: “I don’t know.”
• As society has become more complex, however, the idea of geniuses who can hit to any and all fields makes less sense.
• Awash in gadgets and conveniences that were once unimaginable even within their own lifetimes, Americans (and many other Westerners, if we are to be fair about it) have become almost childlike in their refusal to learn enough to govern themselves or to guide the policies that affect their lives.
• And so it is. When resentful laypeople demand that all marks of achievement, including expertise, be leveled and equalized in the name of “democracy” and “fairness,” there is no hope for either democracy or fairness. Everything becomes a matter of opinion, with all views dragged to the lowest common denominator in the name of equality.

In closing

I did not think it would take me this much time to write about this book, I thought it would be a quick affair, but it took me some work to bring out the essence of each chapter.

The Death of Expertise is interesting read and gave me perspective into a country that I know very little about. It reads easy and can be picked up by anyone. The book is full of these funny titbits that kept me engaged while also highlight concerning state of affairs, for instance when in 2015, Public Policy Polling, a liberal polling group, asked both Republicans and Democrats whether they would support bombing the country of Agrabah, which the fictional country in the 1992 animated Disney film Aladdin, quite a few of them said yes.

The author's point though seems to ring true, there are an increasing number of people globally who take advice from the internet to their own detriment. A good reminder for me personally since I tend think of myself as reasonably educated in most things (I am not). It's hard for me to not get a little surprised and sad reading this book, and also a little angry that we have reached such levels of affluence (at least in the US) that we have nothing better to do than make onwards progress more difficult than it needs to be.

The book does also lay out the responsibilities of experts but I felt that it lets them a little too easy off the hook, and maybe that is because experts are already doing their bit. I don't know.

I also found myself thinking as I was reading the book: Are humans even evolved to live in large groups like nations and democracies? Most of our evolutionary history we have lived in groups that numbered not more than a few hundreds at best. And since the dawn of the agricultural revolution, we seem to be placed in a world that, while more convenient, is also more complicated. Humans, like other animals, tend to mostly care about what is near to them, temporally and physically, because that was good enough for evolution. It may be true that our social structures have surpassed in complexity what evolution programmed us to handle.

Nonetheless, it is what it is, so there is no excuse for not being at least reasonably informed on the pareto of subjects.